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Fax stands in for Tories at election forum

4 April 1992

By JEREMY WEBB

In the largest science debate of the election, the Tories were conspicuous
by their absence. Kenneth Clarke, the education secretary, and science minister
Alan Howarth were both invited to speak at a forum in London. In their place,
came a fax from Howarth which laid out Conservative policy on science.

The fax, which began: ‘It would seem that you did not receive my earlier
response letting you know that I am unable to be present’, was not successfully
transmitted. Howarth’s head appeared as a faceless silhouette and the policy
statement was incomplete.

Invitations to attend the debate were sent to all three parties on the
day the election was called. Labour and the Liberal Democrats organised
speakers. Clarke replied on 21 March that he could not attend. Several faxes,
phone calls and a registered letter were then sent to Conservative Party
central office. New Scientist was told three days beforehand that party
officials were looking into the matter. On Monday, when the debate was held,
Howarth was canvassing in his Stratford-on-Avon constituency where he is
defending a majority of 21 164.

Comments on the Tories’ absence ranged widely. ‘A bloody disgrace’ was
the verdict of one senior scientist at University College London, where
the debate was held. John Mulvey of the lobby group Save British Science,
which organised the event, saidit revealed the Conservative’s lack of understanding
of the scale of the problem facing science in Britain.

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Derek Roberts, provost of UCL and chairman of the meeting, told the
hundreds of people who attended the debate that the Tories’ absence was
‘rather pathetic’. He had especially looked forward to meeting Clarke. ‘I
was given to understand that what he lacked in understanding, he made up
for in bravery,’ he said.

Jeremy Bray, the Labour spokesman on science, declined to comment. However,
Margaret Sharp of the Science Policy Research Unit, who is standing as a
Liberal Democrat candidate in Guildford, described the Conservatives’ action
as ‘malign’. She said they had also consistently failed to turn up at debates
in Guildford and were ‘muffling their opponents’ by stifling debate.

During the debate itself, the government record came in for a severe
pasting. Bray and Sharp lamented the dwindling proportion of the country’s
wealth being spent on science, and Britain’s poor record at competing in
science-based industries. Bray stressed Labour’s policy of increasing overall
funding of R&D from 1.8 per cent of GDP to 2.5 per cent, most of which
‘will be industrial R&D paid for by industry’. He said he expected this
level of funding to be reached ‘well before the year 2000’.

Bray criticised the Conservatives for not redeploying scientists leaving
the shrinking defence sector in civil research. ‘Far from pursuing more
productive lines of research, Britain has been burning the seed corn.’

Sharp said that since 1975 science and technology in universities has
been squeezed by government. It was absurd, she said, that top scientists
spent as much as 75 per cent of their time trying to raise funds to keep
their groups in work. The sorry state of funding is reflected in the falling
number of citations of British research in international journals.

The Liberal Democrats would immediately inject £400 million into
the research councils’ coffers. Sharp also said that money given to British
researchers by the European Community would not be lopped off the science
budgets as it is now. On CERN, the European centre for particle physics,
Sharp said the Liberal Democrats would instigate a ‘five-yearly review to
evaluate costs and benefits’.

The stickiest moment for the speakers came over academic rates of pay
and funding for research. Roberts accused Bray of welshing on a previous
Labour commitment to pay the overheads of research funded by charities.
Sharp argued that the Liberal Democrats would maintain the notion of the
‘well found’ laboratory which could support all but specialist research.

On salaries, Sharp recognised that researchers’ pay had fallen behind.
The Liberal Democrats’ priority, she said, is education – and that included
returning academic salaries to a par with civil servants. ‘But if you inherit
a goddamn awful economic mess which any party coming into power in the next
three weeks is going to inherit, it’s going to take quite a long time to
sort out the books,’ she added. Bray said that a pay review body would have
to function within the limits of the overall resources. ‘There can’t be
just a blank cheque,’ he said.

In the summing up, Roberts stressed the growth of the brain drain and
pointed to the percentage of Fellows of the Royal Society who were living
in the US at the time of their election. It rose from 4 per cent in the
early 1960s, to 13 per cent in 1984 and 20 per cent in 1991. Roberts said
he had checked before the debate and the figure had risen to 30 per cent
in 1992. ‘That is a tremendous rate of growth,’ he said, ‘and I’m sure Kenneth
Clarke would take great pride in it.’ He thanked everyone for turning up.